Once again, after attending a digital health accelerator event, the lack of doctors and other health professionals at the meeting spoke volumes about their unwillingness or inabilility to meaningfully participate in designing, developing and deploying digital health products and services that could help transform sickcare to healthcare and move us towards the quintuple aim.
I begin today with some rather blunt statements, so best to brace for it. Ready?
Medical entrepreneurship is the pursuit of opportunity under VUCA conditions with the goal of creating multiple stakeholder defined value through the deployment of medical technology and care delivery innovation using a VAST business model.
As technology continues to advance and healthcare becomes more digital, more privacy and security concerns start to come with it. This recall of a wirelessly controlled insulin pump is a prime example. According to the FDA:
All too readily in my world, health can masquerade as a moral imperative- the admonishment attached to a wagging finger and reproaching scowl. While there may be responsibilities wound up with health- for ourselves and one another- the main reason to pursue it is far more enticing. Other things being equal, healthy people have more fun. Health is for pleasure. This is perhaps especially noteworthy as the holiday season, with its inevitable blend of temptation, indulgence, and guilt- closes in on us.
Some think digital health is snake oil, i.e. a product that is deceptively advertised or promoted to do something that it has not been proven to do. After all, mobile medical apps don't come with package inserts and that cotton stuffed in the bottle.
Much of my clinical career was devoted to integrative medicine. This is not the time and place to wrestle under control every nuance of an often-fraught definition for such practice, but I can readily characterize the why, what, and how as I experienced them.